Screens, Soldiers and Superpowers (in no particular order.)

Australia’s world-first social media ban for under-16s

On 10^th December 2025, Australia’s Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act came into force, making it illegal for under-16s to hold accounts on major social platforms including TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X, Snapchat, YouTube unless the platforms can prove age-compliance — with fines up to AUS$49m. The law places enforcement responsibility squarely on the platforms rather than on parents or young people themselves. (Yi-Jin Yu, ABC News, 9^th December 2025 – Australia’s social media ban for kids under 16 goes into effect.)

This is not a total social media prohibition: children can still access apps like YouTube Kids, Google Classroom and Roblox, but it is a sweeping attempt to force tech companies to block tens of thousands of Australian children from posting, commenting or interacting online. (Australian eSafety Commissioner, 17^th December 2025.)

However, it seems that teens are an agile and innovative lot (who knew?) and have been downloading a range of second-line apps that have not been made part of the ban (yet) and been setting up VPNs to spoof their locations to work their way round the ban. (Ahmed Yusuf, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 22^nd December 2025 – Under-16s social media ban sees rise in alternatives in app store.)

President Macron threw his (perhaps sleight) weight behind introducing a similar social media ban for under-15s in France. (A previous attempt to enact a similar ban in 2023 foundered on the basis that it was inconsistent with the EU’s Digital Services Act. Oh irony. (Morgane Tual and Florian Reynaud, Le Monde, 2^nd January 2026 – What we know about the government plan.)

Other supporters frame the move as a public-health intervention, seeking to curb anxiety, bullying and addictive usage among younger teens. Critics, including civil liberties groups including legal challengers in Australia’s High Court, argue that the ban may not be effective and risks curtailing political and social engagement, especially if age verification tech is easily circumvented with VPNs and false IDs.

For young people in the UK the relevant question is not “will the UK copy this tomorrow?”, but whether this signals a new global test case for state interventions into digital spaces used by teens and how British policymakers will react to foreign models of online regulation. (Sinead Taylor, Blaze Media – Australia’s Under-16 social media ban: what it means for businesses in 2026.)

Why this matters: every major democracy is struggling with how to regulate digital environments that shape children’s social lives. Australia’s move is a world-first in its legal reach and platform responsibility, even if its real-world impact remains unproven.

Introduction of the UK’s age-verification process for online porn shows that providers, even the most reluctantly compliant, can be forced to act more responsibly.Let’s not give up on making the internet safer for younger people and remove all the advantages and enjoyments that social media can provide in a panic about its (acknowledged!) dangers.

Military gap year schemes — still worth watching

We shoe-horned the MOD’s announcement of plans to expand military gap-year programmes, offering young people paid placements in to our end-of-year youth politics round-up, but more pithily: if this might be a good thing (and TWOP can see no reason why the opportunity to take a year of yomping over the Brecon Beacons and skiing in Verbier in attractively off-green threads could be a BAD thing) the numbers are yet further evidence of HMG’s simple small-mindedness. (Aneesa Ahmed, The Guardian, 27th December 2025.)

There are about 750,000 UK students entering universities every year – so 150 military gappers represent just 0.02% of the entry cohort. If it’s worth doing at all, it must be worth trying to recruit 1.0% and that would be 7,500 places. Come ON guys! Get it together. We used to run an empire in our grandparents’ memories that ruled a quarter of the human beings on the planet. Now the UK seems to be struggling to establish a training programme for 150 students. The ridiculously unimaginative tokenism that this sort of announcement encapsulates suggests that the grown-ups are going to have a tough time actually changing anything at speed, or at scale.

For young people weighing options after education, from universities to apprenticeships to precarious jobs, this mechanism does offer a new pathway. But the blunt reality is that its scale is limited, and its usefulness will depend on whether participants gain transferable skills valued outside the armed forces, rather than merely military experience.

In a context where youth unemployment and under-employment remain stubborn issues, the military gap year programme is a reminder that governments often pitch opportunity as small-scale, niche and experimental. It will be worth monitoring whether broader non-military youth placements already mooted in the civil service, climate programmes and public infrastructure ever materialise too. We have our doubts.

¡Hola Caracas! Bang goes Donny’s Nobel nomination

The Pres seems to have had a bit of a rush of blood to the head. Trump pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, former President of Honduras, who had just started a 45-year sentence for assisting the Sinaloa Cartel’s drug trafficking on 1^st December (William Rashbaum, Maggie Haberman, Kenneth Vogel & Jonah. Bromwich, New York Times, 2^nd December 2025.) However, on Saturday, 3^rd December, Trump pushed the button on capturing/”arresting” Nicolás Maduro in his Caracas enclave and taking him to New York to face charges of, yes, drug trafficking. Perhaps it’s a case of wrong time, wrong cartel?

The global reaction has been swift and deeply divided:

• International law concerns: many legal scholars and diplomats argue the operation lacks clear justification under the UN Charter and could violate long-standing norms against foreign intervention. (Prof Marc Weller, Chatham House, 4^th January 2026 –“The US capture of President Nicolás Maduro – and attacks on Venezuela – have no justification in international law”.)
• Regional backlash: Spain, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Uruguay said in a joint statement that US actions “constitute an extremely dangerous precedent for peace and regional security and endanger the civilian population”
• Voices from diaspora communities: UK-based Venezuelans have expressed a mix of relief at the ousting of an authoritarian government and concern about the legality and future stability of the country. (Sammy Gecsoyler, The Guardian, 3^rd January 2026 – It’s impossible not to feel relief’: UK Venezuelans on Maduro’s capture.)
• Domestic US debate: critics from both political parties  former Vice President Kamala Harris have slammed the operation as unlawful or unwise, arguing it risks deeper entanglement and costs without a clear endgame. (Sophia Compton, Fox News, via New York Post – Kamala Harris blasts Trump admin’s capture of Nicolas Maduro as “unlawful and unwise.”)

TWOP is ambivalent about a lot of this. Maduro clearly hijacked the 2018 election (Prof. José Ignacio Hernández, Electoral Integrity Project, 30^th May 2018) and became even more blatant in his “steal’ of the 2024 election (Tiago Rogero, The Guardian, 10^th August 2024.) Maduro has improperly kept Venezuela under his control for the last 8 years of his 13-year “Presidency.” Removing Maduro therefore seems like a reasonable objective for democratically-inclined nations.

But, for Donald, removing Maduro from power seems to be more to do with his own heightened (and it seems misdirected) sense of outrage about election interference, than any significant dedication to ending or even interfering with the drug trade. Looking more closely at Hernández’s release, engineered through long-time Trump whisperer Roger Stone, Trump seems to have seen parallels between the accusations of election manipulation levelled at Hernández, and the “Russian interference” accusations directed at Trump following the 2016 US election.  So, Trump’s arithmetic seems to be:
Trump – good and improperly accused
Hernandez – ok and improperly accused
Maduro – bad and an election “stealer.”
The product of that equation is “Maduro kidnapped.”

Then you also have the black liquid. It was striking that in Trump’s “Big Stuff” address to the (American) nation from, inevitably, Mar-a-Lago, on Sunday morning (watch via Associated Press stream on YouTube with extended ramble on American oil from 15:30 and his “explanation” of America’s exertion of control over the Venezuelan oil industry from 37:25.

From which, TWOP concludes that:

• the deposition of Maduro must be a good thing for Venezuela
• the apparent absence of any post-deposition regime planning bodes very poorly for short-term Venezuelan peace: a civil war seems more than likely
• US intervention was triggered mostly by Trump’s desire to take (or take back) control of Venezuelan oil resources rather than bogus drug-trafficking charges.

Machado’s covert departure from Venezuela was co-ordinated by the CIA only in early December to enable her to receive the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to her in October 2025. But perhaps it was the award of the Nobel that Donny resents and that may have caused him to reassess her suitability to lead the country on his own rather eccentric criteria.

Also, no word of support for Edmundo González, the former diplomat and Opposition leader widely believed to have “won” the 2024 election (with Machado’s support in the context of her own inability to run for office) and whom had to flee in to exile in Spain in September 2024. Possibly González. One can only conjecture that Trump may have concluded that Machado and González would both be insufficiently flexible about the USA taking control of Venezuelan oil reserves. It makes no sense that not even interim transfer of power considerations seem to have been developed prior to Maduro’s 3^rd December ouster.

The installation of an interim President justified by the 2024 election result, with speedily scheduled democratic elections to restore legitimacy would seem to have been the minimum planning required for this Caracas adventure.

Still, all said, Maduro deposed is a significant improvement on Maduro continuing in power.

Even a newbie diplomat could have briefed the PM that there was no political capital to be made out of avoiding taking a view and that an obvious line “Great for Venezuela that Maduro has gone. Let’s see what we can do to help Venezuela rebuild their democracy” was egregiously and unnecessarily missed. “Nul point monsieur le premier ministre.”

Starmer’s low bar was, however, lowered even further by Darren Jones in the Sunday interview round by presumably not extemporary elaboration that it was not the UK’s place to judge the lawfulness of the US intervention in Venezuela because that was a matter for international law.

Even Lewis Goodall seemed exasperated in his LBC radio interview with the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister and Minister for Intergovernmental Relations, the Rt Hon Darren Jones MP  and with good reason. Intergovernmental Relations should be a hoot under Mr Jones’s astute direction.

The Government can not muster an opinion. Even as a preliminary to a view. Pathetic would not seem to entirely cover this craven incompetence. One can only hope that the good citizens of Bristol North West feel well-represented by the hapless Jones.

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A world-first digital safety law down under, a small-scale youth opportunity that gestures toward service and a stunning geopolitical intervention by the US: the first week of 2026 reminds us that political change seldom aligns neatly with daily concerns, but it does shape the structural environment in which our younger generations will live.

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